Term of the Day

Shovelware is a derogatory term used for software that has either been quickly developed without regard to quality or function and features, or software that has been forced on customers such as those that are preloaded on laptops or smartphones by their respective carriers.
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global supply chain

Read this brief to learn how FICO is helping retailers and grocers to use optimization to increase decision accuracy by 5%-40%, while deploying optimization applications up to 80% faster than possible – collectively, providing businesses with the ability to drive more revenue and customer connectivity while reducing costs.

Life science companies are experiencing a significant transformation in how they bring new products to market.
Organizations must adapt to changes in the marketplace, such as global product commercialization, specialized medicine, new regulations, new payment models, and new technology that are driving more product variety, smaller drug volumes, and shorter product life cycles.
To meet the needs of this new commercial model, life science companies must re-envision the global supply chain and evolve the tools they use to run their business. The supply chain that was designed for launching blockbuster products will not work in the future.
Today, the global supply chain relies on a manual, paper-based process centered on printing documents and sending them via overnight mail, fax, or e-mail with scanned attachments. This time-consuming and costly process is errorprone, tedious for customers and team members, and vulnerable to security and compliance risks.

Last week, SAP Ariba held a human trafficking roundtable event at its SAP Hudson Yards New York City
offices. The roundtable focused on the United Nations Global Compact that adopted 17 sustainable
development goals for its 2030 agenda two years ago. While most individuals and businesses believe
slavery was abolished years ago, there are currently over 40 million forced laborers worldwide. The
United Nations Global Compact initiative is assisting in highlighting the problem of modern slavery,
forced labor, and noncompliance with human rights. And this initiative lines up quite well with
procurement and global supply chains.

Commerce today involves an increasingly complicated supply chain ecosystem. Companies rely on suppliers and buyers across the globe, most of whom they’ve never met. They use multiple carriers and modes of transportation, across international borders, with different languages, currencies and laws. This ever-changing landscape means that companies of all sizes must be more diligent than ever when it comes to managing their supply
chain — and their risk.
In addition, e-commerce has revolutionized purchase behaviors, creating loftier customer expectations, and putting increased pressure on sellers to find new ways to meet those needs. Global networks and tight time constraints can amplify the impact from unpredictable events, like theft, damage, weather and natural disasters. This puts even more pressure on a company’s supply chain, and its bottom line.

Transportation risk comes in many forms and can be very hard, if not impossible, to predict. These include extreme weather, theft, hijacked trailers, global crises, cargo lost at sea, catastrophic truck or rail accidents, truck fires and a whole lot more.
In 2014, the University of Tennessee Global Supply Chain Institute published a white paper titled Managing Risk in the Global Supply Chain. The most surprising finding in the research was that even
though 100% of supply chain executives acknowledged insurance as a highly effective risk mitigation tool, it was simply not on their radar screen, nor in their purview.
Yet, the National Cargo Security Council estimates that there is an annual global financial impact from
cargo loss of $50 billion.